


To Hold

by ladyofrosefire



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Confessions, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Fjorclay Week- Day 3, Fjordclay week, M/M, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23798224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyofrosefire/pseuds/ladyofrosefire
Summary: The faery Lady is shining and beautiful, with long limbs and bright eyes and hair that falls in moonlit waves all the way down to her ankles, and it hurts to look directly at her.Fjord steps forward and grabs Caduceus by the hand. "You can't have him."
Relationships: Caduceus Clay/Fjord
Comments: 16
Kudos: 124





	To Hold

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to NotAFicWriter for beta reading!

The faery Lady is shining and beautiful, with long limbs and bright eyes and hair that falls in moonlit waves all the way down to her ankles, and it hurts to look directly at her.

Fjord steps forward and grabs Caduceus by the hand. "You can't have him."

The Lady goes still, her hand outstretched. Silver threads run from her fingers and tangle around Caduceus, taut in the air between them. Caduceus looks back, eyes wide, and Fjord thinks, _oh fuck._

"What?" The Lady asks, low and quiet.

Fjord raises his chin and squeezes Caduceus' hand. "He's mine. You can't have him. I've already claimed him."

Behind him, Beau hisses, "What the fuck are you doing?"

Fjord casts a desperate look in her direction and then turns back toward the Lady. She tilts her head at him, the silver of her eyes gleaming. His stomach ties itself into a hard knot.

The Lady's long fingers curl into a tight fist, and beside him, Caduceus gasps. The silver lines dig into his skin.

"By what right do you claim him?” she challenges.

“I—” Fjord casts his mind back, all memory gone in a flash of panic. He can remember a hundred healing spells and late-night talks, but none of those things give him any reason to say that Caduceus is _his._

“Do you swear, Lady, that you will let all of us go free if you are satisfied? And that you and yours will leave us and ours alone, afterward?” Caleb cuts in. When Fjord glances back, he finds him stooped into a half bow.

She bears her teeth, the points of them glinting. But when she tries to draw Caduceus forward, Fjord hangs on, and he does not move. “Fine,” she spits. “I swear. But if you fail, he is mine, and the rest of you may beg for my mercy.”

Caduceus catches his gaze, and Fjord sucks in a deep breath.

“I saved his life from— the champion of one of the Betrayer Gods.” Fjord answers, stepping up beside Caduceus. “The Laughing Hand. I went back into battle and pulled him out. I nearly got myself killed doing it.”

The Lady frowns, and her fist remains tight, but the bonds themselves seem to give, slightly, and Caduceus lets out a short breath. “That is one claim only. I have bound him by his name and by the silver moon. You will not take him from me so easily.”

Fjord bites off an _okay._ Caduceus had said it, and those silver lines had whipped around him in a second. Agreeing again might be a forfeit, and while he can feel Beau behind him ready to punch this woman in the face, he does not want to know if this is a battle they can win.

Jester comes up on his other side and gives him a tiny nod.

“His family, too,” Fjord continues. “We fought monsters to get them back.”

“That debt belongs to them,” she retorts.

“Ah, _well,_ ” he shakes his head. “Caduceus asked for our— _my_ —help. We worship the same Goddess. He needed me to come with him for his quest.”

This time, the Lady hisses. Fjord struggles not to flinch. If she does not already know that none of them count that as any kind of debt, he does not want to give her a reason to wonder about it. But when she tries to draw on the cords, they slip through her fingers until they hang in loops off Caduceus’ shoulders and arms. Silver drifts loosely through the air between them.

“Twice, you have claimed him. Still, though, he is mine.” The Lady raises her other hand, more silver threads twisting around her fingers.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fjord catches Caleb slowly raising his hands.

“You bound him twice. Isn’t that enough?” he asks.

Light flares from her so bright it burns. “You _dare_ place yourself equal with me? You dare believe your petty mortal lives and your sapling faith equal my magic?”

Fjord blinks tears from his eyes and steps in front of Caduceus. “He is _mine._ That’s more than enough.”

“Prove your claim, little mortal. Or, if you cannot win him, I will take him and take reprisal from you for your arrogance.”

Her gaze spears him, turning his knees and his guts to liquid, and it takes everything he has not to drop to the ground as she steps forward with her hands raised and raining sparks.

Fjord scrambles for something, _anything_ , and comes up blank. Caduceus has done so much for him that he can’t even think of how to _invent_ a debt. Lying seems like a good way to get them all killed. He doubts this faery will care, either if he says he's Caduceus' captain, sometimes, when they're at sea. If it were Beau she was trying to claim, then it'd be a different story—

"He gave me a purpose," Caduceus answers, his voice low and calm. "I was wandering. I felt doubt and loss, and he made it clear to me that I was meant to be with him. I'm his sign. I'm supposed to stay with him."

Fjord stares at him, face growing warmer by the second, still gripping his hand. And Caduceus looks back at him as though nothing had just happened.

"Fine," the Lady spits, "take your husband and go."

The threads unravel. Caduceus stumbles backward, and Beau grabs Fjord’s other hand. Together, they stagger away. Fjord keeps his hand clenched tight on Caduceus' until the grove passes out of sight and does not entirely let go, afterward.

It's Jester who speaks first in a high, strained whisper. "Husband?!"

"Uh," Fjord replies eloquently.

Caduceus looks at him, then at their group, and then back at him. "Let's... get a little more distance, first. Nothing happened that you all don't know about."

That almost makes him laugh. Fjord keeps moving, keeps following. They hurry through the woods away from that clearing, all of them exchanging looks but no one speaking. And all the while, words pile up on Fjord’s tongue, sticking it to the inside of his mouth and locking up his jaw. And still, they run. Caduceus whispers to the plants, and Jester holds shadows around them to hide their passage. Once, Beau runs up a tree to check their progress.

They don’t stop until hours later.

While Caleb works on the alarm spell, Caduceus beckons to Fjord, nodding toward the surrounding woods. “I want to find some firewood. Cutting anything down seems like it would be a bad idea.”

“Oh,” Fjord replies. His stomach feels the way it did when he went flying off the back of the Roc. “Sure. I’m happy to help.”

The others’ eyes dig into his back as they leave their clearing. Fjord tries to ignore it. He focuses on moving forward, and on trampling as little of the underbrush as possible as he follows Caduceus away from their small campsite. And the whole time, that word still rings in his head— _husband_. There is the memory of Caduceus’ hand in his, too, and of the things he said in the starlit clearing.

He waits until they’ve gotten some distance, although not gone out of shouting range, before he clears his throat. The words don’t come easily, but they do come. “I’m not holding you to anything.”

Caduceus looks back, paused in the act of reaching for a fallen branch. “Of course not.” He picks it up and straightens. “We should ask Jester to talk to the Traveler and find out if there’s anything he can tell us, but I’m not too worried. I’m sure whatever we did here won’t be a problem. I’d have to ask my parents about what’s necessary for a binding ceremony.” A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Besides, there are worse things…”

Fjord closes his mouth, swallows, and busies his hands with grabbing sticks so that he doesn't reach for anything else. “I don’t think I want to know what a faery divorce court looks like.”

Caduceus chuckles. “Probably not.”

“But—” he flounders again, struggling with too many words, this time. “What you said. I didn’t give you anything.”

“Didn’t you?” Caduceus pauses, but when Fjord has no answer, he sighs and continues. “Everything I said in that clearing was true. It had to be. I think you know that, Fjord.”

Fjord searches the ground until he finds another stick and ducks to hide his flaming face as much as to pick it up. “You said you felt lost.”

“Well,” he chuckles, and Fjord thinks, maybe, there’s something off about it. “It was a big change for me, meeting all of you, traveling. We were pirates for a bit. I got blown up by a friend. It’s been a lot. And then… you.”

“Me,” he echoes.

He thought he’d run himself out fleeing the silver fae’s clearing, but apparently not. Except, now, he cannot tell which direction his shaking legs want to take him. His hand remembers the warmth of Caduceus’ fingers laced with his. And at the same time, his throat tightens until he can barely swallow.

When Caduceus speaks again, it’s soft and low. “You grew so much in such a short time. And I got to be there for that, to help. It’s been a gift, Fjord.”

“Well…” he fiddles with one of the twigs, snapping it into steadily smaller pieces. “You know I’d be dead if not for you, a hundred times over. I—I’d be worse than dead.”

“Maybe,” Caduceus agrees.

Then it’s Fjord’s turn to laugh, startled and too loud, and with an edge that he cannot quite hide. “If anyone owes anyone, I owe you. If… If anyone _is_ anyone’s—” then his face goes hot again, and he stops with the rest of his sentence dangling in the evening air.

“You don’t owe me anything, Fjord.”

“That’s not… I mean, _thank you_. Neither do you. But that’s not my point. If I’d been the one caught, not you, I could have come up with a hundred reasons why I already belonged to someone.”

“I don’t need you to belong to me.”

Something in Caduceus’ tone makes him look up from the mangled stick in his hands. Fjord cannot read the expression on his face. For a moment, he stares, the broken bits of twig falling from his limp hands. Then he looks away again. “I know that.”

“Do you?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, you’re not… Possessive. And it’s not like I need you to _belong_ to me, either.”

“Of course.”

Caduceus’ thin boots rustle the leaves underfoot as he approaches until his lichen-marked breastplate and the sleeve of his coat fill Fjord’s field of vision.

“Caduceus—?”

“Yes?” He swears he can feel the rumble of that voice through his ribs.

“I do. Um. I think I could have done that for anyone. But you’re… if I were going to have an Archfey think I was married to someone, I’d choose you.”

“I’d want it to be you, too.”

Finally, he drags his eyes upwards, because yes, he can be oblivious, and forgetful, and sometimes plain _foolish_ , but there isn’t much room for misinterpretation in that. And he finds Caduceus smiling at him, small and hopeful, and thinks that maybe all this scared him just as much. He swallows hard and then reaches out, offering both of his hands. Caduceus lays his in them. Then he bends down, willow-like, and leans their foreheads together.

Fjord closes his eyes and lets out a long breath. “Okay then.”

Caduceus chuckles.

“I’m processing,” he protests, “it’s been a _long_ day.”

“It has.” He frees one hand and brings it up to cup Fjord’s jaw. “It’s worth it, for this.”

They linger for a moment, sharing space, sharing breath, and do not drop their hands. Seconds pass. Around them, tree branches shift in the wind, a susurrus moves through the leaves. Fjord thinks of the silver cords that wound around Caduceus and the way they melted. An Archfey’s magic unraveled because of speeches Fjord hadn’t really meant, but that Caduceus had.

“I—” his throat closes around the words. It’s too much, and too soon, and they won’t come.

“I do, too,” Caduceus replies.

And that’s all he needs.

**Author's Note:**

> The author thrives on comments! 💚💚💚 
> 
> Come and join us on the writing discord, [Haven!](https://discord.gg/WPywUy7)


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